The National Geographic Magazine
Natives paddle out with buckets, nets, and
baskets, and some even scoop the rare seasonal
dish from the sea with their bare hands.
Actually, only half the worm makes the trip
to the surface. The back half, carrying the
eggs, moves slowly out from the holelike
nest in the reef, breaks away from its other
half, and shoots like a tiny living comet to
ward the water's surface. The front, or head
half, merely slips back into the hole, uncon
cerned with the fate of its other half, and
awaits the next moving day.
"Well, after what I saw down there,"
pointed out Private Jones, "I'm ready to be
lieve almost anything!"
He told me of walking along the beach one
day and seeing two Samoan women gathering
something which they tossed into buckets.
"I couldn't tell at first what they were pick
ing up," he went on. "When I got closer, I saw
the younger woman look quickly in the direc
tion of the other to see if she was out of sight.
"Then she grinned at me, quickly picked
out a squirming mass of something from the
bucket, dipped it into the water, and before I
knew what she was doing, she had bitten the
eyes out of a baby octopus and was chewing
and smacking her lips as if it were a T-bone.
"I almost had to crawl away from there.
And I didn't care whether I ever ate again."
Here a sergeant from New Guinea remem
bered the time they were cutting their way
through the jungle over the Owen Stanley
Range and ran out of supplies.
"We had a native guide, a good guy, too."
He added the last by way of convincing me
that the Guadalcanal natives weren't the only
helpful natives in the Pacific.
"We called him Charlie-all the natives
had been given American names by the boys
-Charlie,
George, John. Every once in a
while he'd disappear, and when he came back
he was loaded down with roots and plants and
grubs. He told us they were good to eat, but
I guess either we weren't hungry enough or,
as you put it, we hadn't got used to it yet."
Elusive Bird of Paradise
I asked this Yank whether he had seen any
of the beautifully plumed birds of paradise,
or the huge, flightless cassowaries, or just
what he had encountered in the way of strange
birds or animals.
"I guess our gunfire scared them all out,"
was his reply.
"We heard a lot of racket in
the jungle. The fellows said they were parrots
and laughing jacks. But it seemed like every
time we advanced, the birds and animals
knew there was going to be trouble and they
all cleared out."
The New Guinea area is noted for its varied
bird life. More than 600 species make their
home there. Some, like the birds of para
dise, are found only in this part of the world.
But since most of these rare birds are shy and
keep to the higher mountain elevations away
from the coasts, it is very unlikely that our
soldiers would see them.
They are more likely to see parrots and
cockatoos, lizards, wallabies, and the huge
"flying foxes," or fruit-eating bats, that fre
quent the island (page 461).
One young private, who had picked up a
Jap bullet and was hospitalized in Port
Moresby after only a few weeks of jungle
whacking, said that as far as he was concerned
there was more to see in his own home town
of Chester, Pennsylvania, than there was in
New Guinea.
"And anybody who tells you that place is
one of the paradise isles is just plain crazy!"
He was pretty emphatic about this, too. And
by way of making his stand even clearer
he added: "It's just nothing but ants, leeches,
mosquitoes, and hell!
"I did see a snake down there," he said
very casually, as if it really wasn't very much
to offer.
"It was pretty big-about 12 or 13
feet, I guess. I was clearing the jungle with
a bunch of natives, and were they mad! They
just clubbed that snake to death because it
had swallowed one of their favorite pigs.
They even cut the snake open and tried to
get the pig back."
This New Guinea pig swallower was a
"diamond python, and a very little fellow
compared with its 30-foot-long relative, the
reticulated python, which makes its home in
Burma, Thailand, and the Malay region.
While this snake is rather common in New
Guinea, very few of the boys reported seeing
it. Some were busy finding out what the
"woolly brown animal with the bright-yellow
belly was that seemed to fly through the air."
It proved to be the flying phalanger.
Others were engaged in untangling them
selves from the spider webs that had been
strung from tree to tree by the ambitious
giant spider (Nephila). According to a cor
poral who still brushed his face nervously
when he told me about them, they were "just
like some kind of Jap camouflage spread
between the trees."
This huge spider, often with a leg spread
of eight inches, is a rather common inhabitant
of most of the islands in this region.
The boys from New Caledonia told me they
had difficulty in recruiting volunteers to head
some of their night hikes, which usually took
them along the dry river beds where the
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